The Ice Twins (35 page)

And then, when I woke, that sensation of intense and painful guilt.

A lash of rain makes me turn to the window. The darkness is still out there. Trying to get in.

The noise is repeated, as if someone is finger-tapping, very urgently. Then I hear a ghastly shearing sound. Metallic and loud. The shed door being pulled from its hinges? Everything is being stripped down to the bones.

Thunder booms, on Thunder Island. I gaze down at all the dinky pill bottles on the floor. There are a few dusty tablets left. I could take one. But I want to stay sane and lucid and I want to recall the truth, however painful.

And I don’t think I will need help in going to sleep. I am exhausted: I want to curl up right now. With a prayer. Please please please let the storm blow itself out, overnight.

Adulterous liaison?

Slipping off my clothes until I am down to my underwear, I load the bed with blankets, turn off the light, get into bed, and close my eyes. For half an hour my mind churns the day, as the wind whips at the windows. And then sleep claims me, sucking me under.

I am woken by Lydia.

She is a dim shape in the room. Standing by my bed.

‘Scared, Mummy. The wind keeps trying to come into the bedroom.’

I am groggy, only barely awake. It is so very dark, I have no idea what time. Maybe two a.m., three a.m.?

The wind is busy outside: tearing things up, the rain is still gritty on the windows. This fucking storm. I am so tired.

I reach for the dim form of my daughter. Her warm little hand. I can’t see her face so I am not sure if she is crying. Her voice is wobbly. I yawn widely and say: ‘Come on then, get into bed with Mummy.’

Lydia leaps quickly under the sheets and snuggles up to me and I squeeze her hard, and inhale the sweet smell of her hair, and we cuddle up, spooning. Her warmth is a serious comfort; I fall asleep again, with a feeling close to tranquillity.

And when I wake up it is still dark outside and the wind is still howling, quite undefeated. Unabated. Contemptuous of my prayers. I feel like screaming
Shut up!
Shouting like my dad, like Angus.

And then I realize there is no Lydia in my bed.

But there is the shape of Lydia in the sheets, and the dent made by her head on the pillow.

Where has she gone?

Jumping up, I sleeve myself in my dressing gown and grab a torch, I run barefoot through the cottage – through the cold dark living room, and down the hall, to the door of Lydia’s room. I push open the door and shine the torch on her bed and there she is: asleep in her bed, her little nightlight twinkling.

Just as I left her, hours ago. Clutching Leopardy.

She looks as if she hasn’t moved all night. She surely hasn’t moved all night. If Lydia had come to my room, she would have been obliged to walk through almost total darkness. And she’d never do that.

The fear cuts me deep inside: dicing me into little pieces of panic. If Lydia hasn’t left her bed since I tucked her up, who was it that slipped into my bed last night? Who was that girl? Was I holding Kirstie? Was I clutching a ghost? A real, living, warm-blooded ghost?

This is too much. I am the crazy woman who took the pills. I cannot bear this any more. I look at the small, boxy clock on Lydia’s bedside table. It is not even six a.m. It won’t be light for another two hours.

This has to end. I am hovering on the very edge. I walk back, in the torchlight, into the living room and pass into the dining room, where everything is so cold. Even colder than normal. Why?

Because there is water on the floor; it stings my bare feet it is so cold. The water must have come from somewhere. I can feel it dripping on my shoulder. Timidly I shine the torch upwards.

A huge hole has been ripped in the ceiling: the slates have been stripped away, and a rafter has broken, falling through the plaster, ripping a hole that exposes us to the dark, stormy sky. The wind gusts over the hole; the rain gutters down, and into the cottage.

This is calamitous. We need help.

Stepping over to the window sill, I pick up the phone. It is dead. Of course. Everything is dead. The line has finally given out. One possible hope, I suppose, is the boat, but I can see through the dining-room window that this option is also ruled out. The lighthouse is still flashing, and when it flashes it shows the truth.

I was right about the noise, that shearing: it was the railings of the lighthouse. They have been entirely ripped away, and the boat has vanished. Torn from its moorings, and swept into the blackness, in a few seconds.

Even if we wanted to take the terrible risk of using the boat – in this darkness, and in this weather – we can’t. Not now.

We have no boat. We have no phone. We have no means of communicating with anyone on the mainland, we have no way of reaching Ornsay until the tides are down. We are trapped, and silenced. Me and Lydia.

And whoever else is in here.

I can hear singing.

‘Last night as I laid on my pillow, last night as I laid on my bed.’

The singing is coming from the living room. I am barefoot in cold water: but I am shivering from fear, not from cold.

The ghost of my daughter is singing in the darkness.

‘Last night as I laid on my pillow, I dreamt that my Bonnie was dead.’

She is in the living room. I lean against the window sill to stop myself from collapsing; then I turn and carry my torch into the living room and I shine it on the sofa – and there she is: alone in the dark, barefoot in her soft pyjamas. It is Lydia. I think.

My daughter regards me, blinking in the torchlight. How did she get here? She is white-faced, and she looks exhausted. The rain flails the windows. It will not stop. I walk closer to the sofa.

‘Kirstie is here again,’ she says. ‘She’s in my room. I don’t want to see her any more. Mummy, make her go away.’

I want nothing more than for Kirstie to go away. And maybe Lydia too. I am frightened of both of my daughters, the two ghosts in this house, the two ghosts in my head; the Ice Twins, melting, one into the other.

‘Let’s go into my room and get under the blankets. We can wait for the storm to stop, it will be over soon, it will be light quite soon.’

‘OK, Mummy.’

Obediently, she reaches out a hand – but I pick her up bodily and carry her into the bedroom; where I tuck her into the Admiral’s Bed and then I close the door. Then I slide the bolt. Whatever is out there, I don’t want it to come in here.

Then I get into the bed with my little girl and she snuggles up to me and says, ‘I don’t believe what Lydia says, Mummy. She says horrible things.’

I am hardly listening to my daughter. I can hear a voice outside the door. Who is it?

It must be her. Kirstie. Or Lydia.

It is indistinct, it sounds like
Mummy Mummy Mummy.

Now something knocks on the door. It isn’t the wind. This is the bedroom door. Then the voice speaks again.

It is her. I am sure. She is outside the door.

I am trembling.

I hug my daughter close and I shut my eyes, trying to block out everything, now: the wind, the rain, the noises, the voices. Everything must end. But this storm will never end, this night will never end, it will just go on and on, I have no choice.

My daughter hugs me under the sheets and then she lifts her face very close to me. I can smell her breath in the darkness, it is sweet, childish, untainted, as if she has been sucking something sugary.

She says, ‘Kirstie says it was all your fault. You were with that man. That’s why she came back, to hurt you.’

The shards of ice are in me: cold and cutting, in my heart.

‘What? What man, darling?’

‘The man you were with that night. In the kitchen. I saw you kissing him. So it was your fault, too. I think Nannan knew too, but then she told me I must never say it to anyone.’

I say, ‘Yes.’

Because I can remember. All of it.

This is what I have buried in my mind. This was the reason for my denial. This is the memory I lost because the guilt was too intense to bear. This was the self-loathing blurred by drugs.

The dream was telling me: weeks ago. I was shaved because of my shame. I was naked in the kitchen. There were people staring at me. There was a man, staring at my nudity.

I woke up masturbating. Because it was all about sex. But not the sex with my ex, when the twins were tiny.

Something much, much worse.

Angus was going to be very late. Mum and Dad were out. So I asked a guy over. I’d met him in the boatyard bar in Instow a few months before. And I asked him over that night: because I wanted to sleep with him. I was bored with sex with Angus. I always wanted more sex than he did.

And I wanted the thrill of the new.

‘Mummy?’

‘It’s OK, darling, everything is OK. It’s OK.’

I kissed him passionately in the kitchen. That’s why I was distracted. I was drinking wine with a man I liked and wanted to have sex with – so I kissed him long and deep across the table – and that’s when the twins saw me. I was embarrassed and a little drunk; I shouted at them to go away. Then I fucked the man in the spare bedroom on the first floor.

And the guy’s name was Simon. I remember it all now. A young, handsome guy, a member of a yacht crew. Younger than Angus: a man like Angus when we first met.

The memories pour into me; the truth rains down. The storm has ripped a hole.

After I’d had sex with Simon, he left, and then I fell asleep on the bed from all the wine and the sex and the house was empty, apart from me and the kids. But then the twins knocked gently on the door of the spare bedroom and again I barked at them, boozily told them to go away
again
; and I fell asleep once more.

And then I woke to hear the scream. The scream that told me what I had done.

I ran upstairs and there was my daughter, shrieking. About her sister. And that scream told me a truth I could not bear, I had been unfaithful, a second time¸ and this time it had killed my little girl. And that’s why I lied, immediately, to everyone – the police, the hospital, Angus, everyone – about the man, about the infidelity, about my neglect. I even told them that my twin fell from the first-floor balcony, trying to distract attention, with a foolish lie, so as to hide my guilt. Because the truth was too much and so my lies became the truth. Even for me. Especially for me.

But they still knew what I had done: my awful crime of neglect, and shame. Angus knew, my mother knew, my doctor knew. But they kept it quiet from everyone else, even the police, to protect me?

But how did Mum know? How did Angus find out?

Perhaps my mother saw something, perhaps my daughter confessed, or maybe this guy just said something in a bar:
I was with her mother, that night the child died
. It doesn’t matter. They found out. It was all my fault. I did it. I was with another man – again – and because of that my daughter died. And they’ve been shielding me from the shattering reality ever since.

‘I’m sorry, darling, so sorry, darling.’

‘She’s coming back now, Mummy. She’s outside the door.’

‘Kirstie?’

‘No, Lydie. She’s coming back. Listen.’

The wind is shrieking and the rain is hailing but, yes, I am sure I can hear my dead daughter, outside the bedroom.

Let me in. Let me in. You did it. You must let me in.

I am crying now. My daughter holds me in bed as I cry and my other daughter is outside saying,

Mummy, I’m back now. Let me in. I’m back now.

I kiss my daughter on her forehead and I say, ‘She jumped, didn’t she?’

My daughter stares at me, with those blue eyes like her grandmother. Sombrely, tremulously, she says, ‘No, Mummy. We wanted to climb down, Mummy, from the top balcony. To the other balcony of the other room – the room you were in, Mummy, ’cause we wanted to see why Daddy wasn’t there. We were scared to open the bedroom door, ’cause you shouted at us, but Lydie still wanted to see, see through the window, if you were with the man who wasn’t Daddy. And – and – and she tried to climb down and then I was climbing down and then she grabbed me, Mummy, she grabbed me because she was falling and she pulled so hard she was pulling me too; so’ – my daughter’s eyes are now full of tears, big fearful tears – ‘that’s when I pushed her away, Mummy! And then she fell all the way, it was my fault. You always liked her more and I pushed her off me ’cause I was falling too.’

The tears roll down her face as she speaks.

‘So she fell, Mummy, she fell. And I did it, I pushed her ’cause she was pulling me too.’

I am silenced. My guilt is perfected. There is nothing left to know.

My dead daughter is outside. Guiltless and accusing. I need to say a final sorry, the only way I can. So this is it. The timing is immaculate. I am getting out of the bed, jumping into clothes.

Lydia stares at me in the half-light. Tears drying on her cheek. I crouch by the bed, and stroke the sweet blonde hair from my daughter’s troubled face. ‘Darling,’ I say. ‘Don’t feel guilty. It was all my
fault.’

‘But it’s not all right, Mummy? Is it?’

‘No. It is. I am so sorry. It truly wasn’t your fault, darling. You were just playing. It was all me, all my fault, everything. Everything has been my fault, all the time. Because of what I did, that night, you’ve been confused – so confused, for so long. Because of me.’ I breathe deep and kiss her forehead. ‘And that’s why we’re going to get away, from here, right now.’

‘In the dark? It’s too dark, Mummy.’

‘That’s OK, sweetie, I have a torch.’

‘But the wind? And the dark an’ everything?’

‘It’s all right. You can come with me. It’s low tide at six. We can cross now in the dark. It won’t take so long.’

Lydia looks at me from the bed. She frowns again, deeply puzzled. She rubs the last tears from her eyes with her fist. And I know that if she starts crying again I won’t be able to do this terrible thing. So I need to be quick.

‘Remember I always loved you. Always. Both of you.’

She is silent for a moment and then she says, ‘I’m sorry I fell, Mummy. I’m sorry I tried to climb down to see you. I’m sorry I pulled at Kirstie …’